All The Best Lines From A Fifteen-Year-Old Edition of "Country Life" Magazine
All The Best Lines From A Fifteen-Year-Old Edition of "Country Life" Magazine
Country Life is a weekly UK magazine that launched in 1897 and covers a variety of subjects relevant to country life. It is not to be confused with the UK edition of Country Living, a monthly magazine that launched in 1985 and covers a variety of subjects relevant to country living. Recently I came into temporary possession of the issue from September 22, 2005, which cover story asks “WHO IS BRITAIN’S MOST LOVED PARSON?” (The answer is David Reynish.)
Never let it be said that I do not share the goods, or that my hand has ever been found stinting. When I benefit from reading back issues of Country Life magazine, you benefit from back issues of Country Life magazine. Here are some of the most important lines to be found therein:
On politics:
A chastened President Bush can draw strength from London.
To be Prime Minister should be analogous to chairing a public company: a three-day-a-week job, running the board of directors, not the business.
Just as Mayor Giuliani took strength from the London Blitz, so President Bush might find both encouragement and lessons from 1666.
Worth listening to: Sir Stirling Moss.
No sooner had the nation begun to recover from the elation of Gordon Brown’s new baby (we offer our congratulations), than it was shocked to discover that the Prime Minister has suffered a heart problem. Naturally, this distracted attention from the ending of David Blane’s self-imposed ordeal, as he emerged from a glass box above the Thames as he emerged from a 44-day fast.
On gender:
Men have been fascinated with owls since prehistoric times and this continues today.
He is normal.
The choice of name reflects her modesty and her bisexuality alike.
But now the voice has a new authority, for it belongs not to a lowly fourth former, but to a young man enjoying his newly acquired fagging privileges.
He imitated Queen Victoria (to whom he bore a marked facial resemblance).
On public health:
Foot-and-mouth disease was never a real risk to humans.
You prepare for a hurricane and then you get Lyme disease.
On the natural world:
Removing eggs from certain birds or bats is a heinous crime.
There are some plants that you think highly of, perhaps for many years, but then you think, ‘Enough. I’ve gone through that. There are plenty of others that will give me more enjoyment.’
To my regret, I lost a Claret Shrimp on some barbed wire in 1971, but I do have a black Moose Hair from the same period, dressed by the late Megan Boyd of Brora, who taught me her craft.
There is room to make not loud but gentle foliage contrasts, where the main effect is shape.
My little Yellow Humpy won its place in the dish for tempting a brownie of over 7lb from the Upper Test — then the record for that beat — and there is not much left of this white Muddler which accounted for some voracious sea trout from a Falklands estuary, back in 1992.
In my Essex garden, I am drawing inspiration from the geology of the Ice Age.
Bergenias. Surely, by now, you must admit they are overrated?
A good tip for picking raspberries is to have a belt.
Do you adore all hemerocallis? I certainly don’t.
What really excites fanciers is spotted pigs in rare colours.
To save Sandy Mitchell further disappointment, I suggest he uses blue gault instead of ordinary clay to make his pond thoroughly waterproof.
I appreciate ornamental grasses more and more.
Who wants to be eternally spraying their Michaelmas daisies against mildew?
On friendship:
As a child, I used to wish that one of my friends would grow up to become as famous as Mrs. Guy Ritchie (aka Madonna).
Even non-Anglicans like him.
My friend Frederick Buller — a pike expert, and author of The Domesday Book of Mammoth Pike — lost a massive specimen in Loch Lomond in 1967 when a knot failed.
He could be just as sound about friends, predicting that Diana Mitford would soon outrgrow her future husband Bryan Guinness (she ran off with Oswald Mosley).
A friend of my father, just turned 80, recently revealed that he had never heard of Rolf Harris.
On family:
When my uncle, Julian Fellowes, won his Oscar for Gosford Park, the thought flashed through my mind that perhaps my life would change too.
Who better than her fashionable daughter to showcase her mother’s designs?
At 26, the Titian-haired Lady Honor is the eldest daughter of the Marquess of Douro and a granddaughter of the 8th Duke of Wellington.
The crown, which the groom had lovingly constructed for his bride out of bits of the hedge-row, had cut her quite badly on the forehead when he lowered it tenderly into her hair, causing her to drip blood over her tin foil coating for the ceremony.
Since she is so clever at training her dressage horses, my younger daughter has been given the opportunity to extend her skills to the dogs.
In Greece, Byron’s name opened all doors, but he was not related to the poet.
On word counts:
Parishioners in the amalgamated parish of Great Yeldham, Little Yeldham, Stambourne, Toppesfield and Tillbury Juxta Clare, and others like it, were left with little room after writing their location to describe their priest.
On leisure:
We began to relax when we received a letter from one parish proudly described as ‘12 miles from the nearest lemon.’
I had to pinch myself: Not only do we have a play about country life, but also one that offers a passionate defence of the overworked, undervalued, bureaucratically harassed small farmer.
Nothing cheers a truly rural village like the sight of a black-coated vicar astride a horse.
I have begun accepting invitations to regattas and races in pleasant parts of the Mediterranean.
First of all, as far as archaeology is concerned, metal-detecting is a two-edged sword.
In eloquently putting the case for the pig man, he brings home the theatrical bacon.
This book could not be more timely: Just as Stephen Fry’s Bright Young Things is appearing on the cinema screen.
Unnecessary digs:
‘They’ll need a tranquiliser after this,’ gasps a tomato-faced female teacher, as she dashes after the mob surging towards the altar.
One sees too many Old Masters on the market nowadays that are utterly depressing.
All that dreary yew and box.
George V never looked better dressed than when aboard a yacht.
Let us move from the faintly ridiculous to something that verges on the sublime.
Unsourced claims:
No doubt our readers can identify the regiment.
Last year, sleeping piglets were making astronomical sums.
I think Stanley Spencer would have enjoyed this painting.
Pliny claimed pikes could reach 1,000lb in the Rhone, but he may have been thinking of sturgeon.
Luigi Macaluso, the Umberto Eco of the Swiss watch industry.
On architecture:
The evocative form of the traditional Scottish laird’s house is emphatically vertical.
When I bought my decrepit early-Georgian London townhouse it was suffering from a serious identity crisis.
Why is England often so disgracefully neglectful of the houses where its greatest artists lived?
There are plenty of ruined tower houses up glens which it would be fine to restore, but Tioram’s relationship as a ruin to its landscape setting is of outstanding importance.
She called it ‘this humble little farm erection.’
These days, the number of rectories, parsonages and vicarages being sold off by the Church of England each year can be counted on one hand.
On business:
Lady Honor’s shop is a roaring success with the ‘Waterloo Bangers’ flying off the shelves.
Most lawyers charge by time.
She has also married wisely — her husband, the Hon Orlando Montagu, has his own food business, Earl of Sandwich, which has recently opened an outlet in Walt Disney World, Florida.
The easiest way to run power lines or telephone wires into people’s houses is to string them from poles.
When a new box of cricket balls was required, Brown would carefully collect the old ones and take them personally to be sold at a shop in Coalhaven. ‘Facta non verba,’ he would say. ‘Praetio prudentia praestat.’
On dining:
Heath says that Agas should not be riddled back and forth as I have been doing, but that the riddling hook should engage with the spindle’s teeth and move from right to left until it is stiff to turn.
I am old enough to remember the arrival of the first bananas after the banana-less war. Before she would let me bite into this longed-for delicacy, my mother told me that I must always cut the rounded bit off each end of any banana that came my way. She believed that if it was poisonous, the poison would be contained in those little round ends.
On Wales:
I still have copies of your 1975 and 1977 Welsh numbers and would prefer to add a 21st-century issue than regard them as precious rarities never to be repeated.
Ironically, Scotland and north Wales remained peregrine strongholds during the 1960s, and I can recall vividly the excitement of watching a peregrine on Snowden in February 1967.
I NEED to know what the name is that reflects both bisexuality and modesty
𝓐𝓭𝓿𝓮𝓻𝓽𝓲𝓼𝓮𝓶𝓮𝓷𝓽 : 𝑽𝒂𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒕𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒒𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒕𝒚 𝒗𝒊𝒍𝒍𝒂𝒈𝒆 𝒏𝒆𝒘𝒔𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌 𝒄𝒐𝒑𝒊𝒆𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝑭𝒂𝒓𝒎𝒆𝒓'𝒔 𝑾𝒆𝒆𝒌𝒍𝒚 𝒂𝒗𝒂𝒊𝒍𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝒐𝒏 𝒆𝒏𝒒𝒖𝒊𝒓𝒚 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒅𝒊𝒔𝒄𝒆𝒓𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒏𝒆𝒘𝒔𝒍𝒆𝒕𝒕𝒆𝒓 𝒂𝒖𝒕𝒉𝒐𝒓.